The wire protecting ring described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,608,252 addresses a related problem, namely, protecting electrical wire ends in a junction box during the construction of a wall. That patent recognizes the need for protecting the wire ends inside the wall while the surface members of the wall are being installed, namely, in this case, the wallboards. The patent discloses a ring which can be installed over an outlet box to identify the location of the box for the person who installs the wallboard sheets. The ring is intended to protect the wire ends inside the box as a portion of the sheet over the box is cut away and removed. A panel in the center of the ring over the wire ends closes a central aperture in the ring so that the cutting tool which the wallboard installer uses will not damage the wires. The panel is connected to the frame portion of the ring with links which may be broken, and the panel thereafter removed, so that an electrician can get through the wallboard to the interior of the box and grasp the wire ends in order to pull them out and affix them to a switch or other fixture on the roomside surface of the wallboard.
Generally similar protective plates are illustrated in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,166,329; 6,479,749; and 6,462,278. And in U.S. Pat. No. 6,403,883 a protective plate which is nested into an electrical utility box utilizes a spike which points outwardly from the plate and pierces any covering put over the box in order to identify where the box is.
While these assemblies protect wires which have been brought into the utility boxes, none of them deal with what occurs when a wallboard finisher closes the gaps between the rough cut edges of the wallboard around the box and the edges of the box itself with drywall compound. Oftentimes the compound is inadvertently spread over the edges of the cover plate, making it difficult to find and hard to retrieve any wiring inside the box. Moreover, none of these patents deal with an installation in which a utility box is not used, i.e., when the wire or cable ends are simply left inside the wall to be extracted later, assuming that they can be found, through a nondescript hole in the wallboard left by the previous workman, often without identification of the type of wiring or the type of fixture to be connected.
The present invention solves these and other wire and cable end retrieval problems. It provides means for quickly identifying the type of electrical installation to be placed at a particular location. And it provides means for quickly withdrawing the wire or cable ends from the wall, whether they are in a utility box or not, and eliminates having the ends covered with dried joint compound.